— This week’s Monday Roundup is brought to you by the Coast Hills Classic Mountain Bike Race, coming this Sunday (5/4) to Newport, Oregon.
Here are the bike links from around the world that caught our eyes this week:
Where do we bike? Or, at least, where do people who track their rides with GPS bike? Strava knows. Among the local lessons in this beautiful “heat map”: the east-side greenways are very popular (especially NE Going and SE Lincoln/Harrison); and Broadway is by far the most-used route through downtown.
Suing the victim: A Canadian woman who killed a teen with her car is suing the dead boy’s estate for $1.4 million to compensate for her “pain and suffering.” It’s a countersuit to a civil suit by the family of the victim, who her suit says was riding at night without being “properly illuminated.”
Thief shaming: A few days after posting a Craigslist warning that they had put bait bikes around town, San Francisco police followed up with a Craigslist posting of the guys who’d stolen them.
Regressive fee: “Polls do not tell us the right thing to do,” writes local Ph.D student Paul Manson in a blog post that tears into the city’s per-household street fee proposal by discussing its context: 1990s ballot measures that slanted Oregon’s local tax system toward the wealthy.
Detroit’s new wheels: “It’s a great time to be a bicyclist in Detroit,” the Detroit News writes, in part because there’s not much competition for road space these days.
Bike-friendly cobblestones: In one Copenhagen neighborhood, the city is “replacing the old, bumpy cobblestones on certain streets with smooth ones.”
Auto advocacy: A coalition of car-loving San Franciscans is pushing a nonbinding ballot issue calling for “restoring transportation balance in San Francisco” by charging less for auto parking and ticketing jaywalkers.
Bike prison: “Eighteen months after Superstorm Sandy inundated New York City, thousands of bicycles still sit, rusting, in a warehouse in an obscure corner of Brooklyn.”
Bike share premium: As London’s bike share stations have crept beyond the transit-dense city core, landlords are noticing that tenants are willing to pay much more to live near bike share.
Bike share subsidy: “It’s time to put the city in Citi Bike,” an NYC advocate writes, making a case for public bike share funding.
Low-car life everywhere: Even in relatively transit-poor cities like Indianapolis or Tampa, young adults say they prefer to live in places that don’t require constant car use.
Cargo bike pros: DHL and other international delivery companies are now building cargo bikes into their business models.
Transportation as design: The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum gave one of its top 2013 awards to former New York City Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Kahn.
Bankrupt highways: The Economist looks at federal highway finances from about 20 miles up — and it even looks bad from there.
Localizing transportation: One former USDOT leader thinks the country could get more from its gas tax if it spent more on competitive local grants and acted less like an entitlement program for state DOTs. Low-car advocacy group Transportation For America likes the idea.
Safety in numbers: The Alliance for Biking and Walking’s latest benchmarking report shows that where biking is popular, it’s also safe.
Financing suburbanization: Watch out for the rhetorical slight-of-hand in this New York Times op-ed (the stats for cities include suburbs, too), but the underlying argument is strong: with both young and old suddenly eager to live in central cities, political momentum for cutting the federal home mortgage subsidy is actually rising.
Dan Morgan of Houston has been trying to educate drivers about safe passing distances by attaching a three-foot-long plastic flagpole to the side of his bike. The results are your video of the week:
If you come across a noteworthy bicycle story, send it in via email, Tweet @bikeportland, or whatever else and we’ll consider adding it to next Monday’s roundup.